The month of May is “ME Awareness Month”, with May 12th being the particular day, and I have also seen the week starting May 11th designated as ME awareness week.

ME is classified by the World Health Organisation as a neurologically-based disease. It is of unknown cause, although there are several theories including viral and environmental agents. There is no known cure.

Unfortunately, in the UK the NHS seems to have ignored the WHO’s classification of ME as a specifically neurological illness, and has lumped ME together with any and all unexplained tiredness and fatigue, which can in fact be caused by a number of things, including Lyme Disease, Lupus, vitamin B12 deficiency and Pernicious Anaemia, Thyroid and adrenal problems, Sjögren’s, PCOS and other endocrine diseases, MS, fibromyalgia, depression and more, and has called the whole collection CFS, MEcfs or cfsME.

Within the umbrella of CFS there is obviously a vast spectrum of symptoms which range in severity, from those who are experiencing a mild loss of ‘get up and go’ to those who are in constant pain and utterly bedbound and unable to care for themselves, and since it is an umbrella term, treatments that may be helpful for mild types of CFS, such as GET – graded exercise and CBT – cognitive behavioural therapy, are wholly inappropriate and can be harmful for those who actually have ME.

CBT can be useful for people not coping well with any long term chronic illness but should not be touted as a main treatment for ME in the way that it is, based on the faulty assumption that CFS is inevitably linked to caused by psychological factors, and GET is harmful to PWME who have the key symptom of Post exertional malaise.

This situation has been exacerbated by the psychiatric establishment which has greedily claimed all ‘CFS’ patients as their own, baselessly alleging that all CFS must be related to mental and emotional factors.

Thus the tendency is to treat all CFS patients as though they are all suffering from an unexplained, probably psychologically-based, rather than neurologically-based illness, regardless of the severity, and further to fail to investigate thoroughly or adequately in order to rule out any other cause (such as those listed above).

There is no definitive test for ME yet (largely because genuine research has been so scarce), and so ME should never be diagnosed until every other possible cause has been eliminated.

The classification of ME together with any unexplained CFS is a nonsense which means that people who actually have curable and treatable diseases aren’t getting the help they could and should be able to expect, while those with ME are simply treated with disdain instead of receiving the palliative care they need.

This is a wholly unacceptable situation for everybody involved, which helps no-one, except those few outspoken psychiatrists who like to gain notoriety by making the psychological case and denying the reality of the suffering.

A friend has also pointed out that MS, asthma, duodenal ulcers and other illnesses were all considered psychiatric problems before biomedical caught up.

UKIP DONOR DEMETRI MARCHESSINI VOICES REPELLENT VIEWS ON RAPE, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND STILL THE PARTY TAKE HIS MONEY

Demetri Marchessini thinks it is fine for a husband to rape his wife, that homosexuality is a sin and that women should not be allowed to wear trousers, yet Ukip are still happily taking his cash, it has been revealed.

UKIP distanced themselves from the wealthy shipping and investment magnet in May last year after he published a book –Women in Trousers: A Rear View – airing his charming views. The party also didn’t appear overly keen to be connected to the Greek tycoon in January this year when he claimed “sodomy has always been a crime”. But Channel 4 News has reported that, despite Marchessini’s controversial outbursts, Ukip has since accepted at least one other donation from him.

In renewed embarrassment for the beleaguered party it was revealed Ukip received a further £5,000 from Marchessini four months ago – after the party’s apparent falling out with the businessman over his views on homosexuality and women’s rights.

In an interview Wednesday with Michael Crick, Marchessini created fresh trauma for the party by voicing more of his eyebrow-raising views.

He argued there is no such thing as marital rape, saying: “If you make love on Friday and make love Sunday, you can’t say Saturday is rape.”

He said women should be banned from wearing trousers (a favourite line of his) because they “discourage love-making”. Women, he said, should only be allowed to wear skirts, because “that is the only way the world is going to continue. Because if they don’t men are going to stop f***ing them.”

Additionally, apparently “there is no such thing as fidelity in homosexual relationships.”

Asked whether Ukip should be taking cash from a donor with such repellent views, leader Nigel Farage replied: “Possibly not.”

Benefits and Work has obtained documents via the Freedom of Information Act that may undermine claims by Atos that its staff were the subject of nearly two thousand episodes of assault or abuse, including death threats, by claimants in 2013 alone. Atos used the claim to justify wanting to exit early from the contract to carry out work capability assessments (WCAs).

Atos claimed that they were experiencing around 1,956 incidents throughout the year.

This was, by any standards, a very serious accusation.

Characterising thousands of sick and disabled claimants as violent thugs that Atos could no longer expose its staff to is likely to have increased the level of prejudice against benefits claimants. It may even have contributed to a rise in the number of violent hate-crimes committed against disabled people.